A Baghdad Blogger

During the past five months, a Manhattan office worker named Diane has exchanged nearly a hundred e-mails with Salam, a young architect in Baghdad. She is an unmarried Jew who lives on the Upper West Side; he is a closeted gay Iraqi from a wealthy family. What unites them is the fact that they are both the secret authors of blogs—Internet diaries that allow them to share their pent-up thoughts with the masses. Diane uses her Web site to express caustic opinions about the Middle East crisis. Salam’s blog, which has somehow avoided being shut down by the Iraqi regime, is devoted to letting the world know how awful it is to be governed by “freaks” like Saddam Hussein (and how the only thing that’s worse is having his home town pummelled by American bombs). Although Salam and Diane often disagree about politics—Diane supports the war, for example—they are fellow-cynics who have rapidly become confidants.

The day after the Bush Administration began its aerial attack on Baghdad, Diane was relieved to see that Salam was unharmed, and that, almost as important, he remained connected to the Web. (Iraq’s official Internet service, Uruklink, was still providing spotty service.) Salam’s site appears to be the only blog written by an Iraqi citizen.

“These first bombs completely missed his neighborhood,” Diane said, sitting in front of her office computer, which was fringed with magenta Post-it notes. After closing the door, she said that nobody she worked with knew about her friendship with Salam or about her blog, which she calls Letter from Gotham. “I enjoy living this sort of parallel life,” she said.

In his new posting, Salam had noted with relief that the bombing was “not yet comparable to what was going on in ’91.” He described wandering around town with his father after daybreak, looking for an open bakery. He wrote about Saddam’s most recent speech, and noted, sarcastically, “This morning, he’s got verse in it!!” Salam seemed starved for information. Iraqi television, he wrote, “says nothing, shows nothing.” His family had furtively hooked up a forbidden satellite dish in the hope of picking up the BBC.

Diane had just received a personal message from Salam in which he referred to the first American bombs as “fireworks.” She began typing a hasty response. “The bombing campaign will start in earnest tomorrow,” she wrote. She paused briefly before pounding out, “I hate those silly people who tell you to stay safe, but stay safe.”

Much of the appeal of Salam’s blog lies in his brash sense of humor. He calls himself a “heretic fag” and confesses to having his own “ABBA costume.” Complaining about government rations, he wrote, “We have been getting really nasty Egyptian soap. I am sure they wouldn’t wash their tiled floor with it for fear of corrosion, but it is good enough for Iraqis.” And he groused about finding a cockroach inside a bottle of Iraqi beer.

Seditious postings like these are unlikely to be tolerated by Iraq’s secret police. In Salam’s first private e-mail to Diane, in October, he confided that, if the Mukhabarat found out about the blog, “I’d be pasta sauce.” Fortunately, he added, “the Internet thing is so new here they don’t really know how to control this.”

Although Salam hasn’t included many details that would betray his identity, he sent Diane an e-mail in November entitled “Things I Shouldn’t Tell You.” His mother was a Shiite, he said; his father was a Sunni. When Salam was a child, the family spent several years in Europe, where he discovered that he had a talent for foreign languages and acquired a skeptical view of religion. His family returned to Iraq a few years before the Gulf War. Salam said that his present job, for the Baghdad office of a Lebanese architectural firm, required him to travel to Beirut on occasion, which allowed him to “keep in touch with the rest of the world.” He said that he was unwilling to become an exile; he loves his family too much. “I am better off than most—I should shut up and never ever complain,” he said, noting that he is a member of a very powerful family. (On his blog, he goes by the name Salam Pax. Diane prefers to call him Salam, Queen of the Desert.)

Some readers have questioned the authenticity of Salam’s blog. “At first, I wondered if he was a C.I.A. agent or something,” Diane admitted. But she is now convinced that he’s real. For one thing, Salam doesn’t follow any clear ideological line; he is both anti-Saddam and anti-American. Diane also believes that “the details he gives about Baghdad are too convincing to be fake.” In one posting, Salam vividly described the son of the Iraqi defense minister “driving that fancy car around Arasat Street intimidating everybody like all good sons of ministers do.” And he has offered withering dissections of the propaganda that appears on Iraq’s state-run television networks.

Last month, Salam mailed Diane some ceramic tiles. He also sent her digital photographs of himself. She pulled up three images of a plump, balding, genial-looking man. Smiling at one of the pictures, which appeared to have been taken in front of a shower curtain, Diane said she doubted that Salam’s Internet connection would last much longer. But she remained hopeful that their friendship would one day resume. “We’ve joked about my driving from Jerusalem to Baghdad,” she said. “But, after the war ends, I really hope I get the chance to meet him.”

This article appears in the print edition of the March 31, 2003, issue.

Daniel Zalewski is the magazine’s features director. He has
contributed profiles of Werner Herzog, Ian McEwan, and others.